Col. John Alexander, the "father of non-lethal weapons," details his military career—from Vietnam’s Special Forces to Los Alamos—where he shaped U.S. defense policy in 1996, emphasizing tools like rubber bullets and infrastructure-disrupting tech. In Iraq, psychological ops (leaflets, Kuwait explosions) outmatched rumors of cyberattacks, while Wall Street’s vulnerability to viruses mirrors the 1993 Trade Center bombing’s economic chaos. He dismisses conspiracy theories—MK Ultra, HAARP weather manipulation, or Nazi/Soviet mind-control resurgence—as baseless, stressing military pragmatism over fringe claims. Yet, his work reveals how non-lethal tactics, despite mixed adoption (e.g., Somalia’s lasers), could redefine warfare’s ethical and operational boundaries in an era of shifting global threats. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, as the case may be across all these time zones, stretching from the beautiful Hawaiian and Haitian Island chains, eastward all the way to the Caribbean and the U.S. Virgin Islands, south into South America, north to the Pole and worldwide on the internet.
This is Coast to Coast, A.M., and I'm Mark Bell.
Good morning.
Got a treat for you this morning.
Dr. John Alexander is going to be my guest.
He has been a leading advocate for the development of non-lethal weapons.
Non-lethal weapons since he created renewed interest in that field beginning in 1989.
His influence in the area has been so great that he publicly has been called the father of non-lethal weapons in several major publications.
He entered the U.S. Army as a private in 1956 and rose through the ranks, retiring as a full colonel in 1988.
During his varied career, he held many key positions in special operations, intelligence, and research and development.
From 1966 through 69, he commanded Special Forces A teams in Vietnam and Thailand.
His last assignment was as a director, Advanced Systems Concepts Office, U.S. Army Lab Command.
After retiring from the Army, Dr. Alexander joined Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he was instrumental in developing the concept of non-lethal defense.
As a program manager, he conducted non-lethal warfare briefings at the highest levels of government, to heads of industry, and at academic institutions, including Harvard and MIT.
Dr. Alexander organized and chaired the first two major conferences on non-lethal warfare and served as the U.S. delegate to three NATO studies on that topic.
As a member of the Council on Foreign Relations Non-lethal Warfare Study, he was instrumental in influencing the report that is credited with causing the Department of Defense to create a national non-lethal weapons policy in July of 1996.
For several years, he's been a distinguished guest lecturer at the U.S. Air Force Air University and participated in key war games when non-lethal weapons were first being considered.
Academically, he holds an M.A., Pepperdine University, BhD, Walden University, and later attended the Anderson School of Management at UCLA, the Sloan School at MIT, and the Kennedy School of Government General Officer Program, National and International Security for Senior Executives at Harvard.
In addition to many military awards for valor and service, Aviation Week selected him as a 1993 Aerospace Laureate.
He received a Department of Energy Award of Excellence in 1994 and is listed in Who's Who in America and Who's Who Worldwide.
Dr. Alexander wrote the seminal articles on non-lethal warfare.
He published articles in Jane's International Defense Review, the Boston Globe, and several other defense journals.
Articles about him and his work can be found in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Newsweek, Sunday Times, London, Paranormal Italy, the LA Times, Wired magazine, GQ Scientific American, and Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and many others.
He has appeared on international television in Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, and the U.S. Currently, if all that is not enough, he's the Director for Scientific Liaison for a private research institute, serves as a consultant to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and writes independently.
Well, all right, now to Father Alexander, actually Dr. John Alexander, who is, I believe, in Las Vegas.
Is that correct, Doctor?
That's correct.
Wonderful to have you on the program, and I guess if you have to be known as the father of something, being known as the father of non-lethal weapons would be the way to go.
To a high end of what we call strategic incapacitation, where you can bring down a nation or a complex target set such as that, again, without dropping hard bombs and killing people.
I think you can certainly have impact on complex targets such as that, but difficult to do.
By attacking the infrastructure targets, such as communications, electronics, electrical grids, transportation systems, you have the ability to really apply force in some unique ways.
I noticed that the little bit I read on you here, or quite a bit it really was, suggests that they are defensive non-lethal weapons.
Wouldn't non-lethal weapons of the sort you're discussing, the latter sort, be really either defensive or offensive, depending on what you were trying to do?
Well, I think that the whole concept of national defense is in the process of changing and that what we are going to go through is a change from national defense, where we were talking about the actual survival of our country and others, to a period of national security, which I think is something that's drastically different, but I think is the political realities of the future.
I don't think there's anything that in fact in the early years around 1990, 1991, as the concepts were first being developed, one of the thoughts was something like a parallel initiative.
It certainly did not seem like there was a political will to create a new initiative.
But I think the technologies in general would be very, very different.
Suppose we were to begin to get into a very serious situation with a country like Iran, and we wanted to, as best we could, disable them, disable their infrastructure without dropping bombs.
Well, first, let me say, I think you've hit on a very important point.
Let me back up a little bit and get to it.
But you remember, one of the problems we had with Iraq is they did not believe that we were serious.
Saddam, right up to the last minute, believed that the U.S. would back down because we were unwilling to accept casualties.
And I think some of the systems that we have in a situation such as any of those in the Middle East is you have the ability to send a very strong message that you have the will, the intent, and the capability to use force.
And you're going to do it.
And by the way, one other caveat in all of these, I always maintain, that you have to have a lethal backup.
These systems do not operate in isolation.
If you're going to be believable, you've got to have lethal force and have an overwhelming capability.
Having said that, I prefer not to talk about specific countries, but that gets into real political sensitivities, of course.
But if you're going to go after a complex target, such as the one you described, all of advanced societies today rely heavily on both electricity and certainly information systems, if you will.
So I'm sure you've heard of information warfare, the ideas of using computer viruses to bring down systems.
You can create havoc with them in this day and age.
I understand that during the war with Iraq, prior to, it's fairly public knowledge, I believe, that prior to the first air assault, we somehow infected their air defense system computers with a virus and totally screwed it up.
All right, Doctor, when you first began presenting the concept or the idea of non-lethal warfare, you're talking to the guys who have practiced nothing but lethal warfare, breaking things and killing people.
How well did they accept your idea of disabling the enemy without killing?
And I think the mixture tended to be based on level of responsibility.
If I talked to guys whose responsibility was to take the next hill and get there with all of their troops alive, they would say, I want more steel on target.
You know, just blow the hell out of them.
If you talk to the very senior people, people who have responsibility for lives, who look at the long-term influence of application of force, they were the ones that said, I really want alternatives.
I had talked to the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs just before we were going into Somalia.
And this was our first major humanitarian operation.
And he was saying, the last thing I want to do is to go in and kill people that were there to feed.
Now, there were really several distinct operations.
Now, if you talk about Provide Hope, which was the early operation, that's one where I'm not particularly happy.
We went in with a show of force with the assumption that if our guys went in showing rifles and bayonets, that the enemy would naturally cower in the presence of the omniscient Americans.
And what we found was they backed off a little bit, went into a sniping mode, and it became really a horrendous situation, enough so that we eventually pulled out.
Now, we were replaced, as you will recall, with UN forces.
And then finally we had the extraction.
And there was an operation called United Shield, in which we reinserted Americans and covered the extraction of the UN forces.
And that was the first time, to my knowledge, where we openly said we have selected non-lethal weapons available.
We took them in and on a limited basis used them.
I would say before that, by the way, they did use OC or the pepper spray sorts of things.
So that's about what they had during the early phases of Provide Hope.
Well, first of all, I've sort of become a coordinator across the board, and the laboratories and industries around the country now work on a wide, wide variety of technologies.
Some of them are really quite simple.
There's a lot of work, for instance, going into low-impact kinetic rounds.
You see these in law enforcement as well as in the military.
And these are just things that will knock you on your butt rather than killing you.
Sometimes they have something called the rag or the rotating airfoil grenade, which is like cloth that are expanding, but there's still sufficient impact.
There are things, tasers and now air taser that can be electrical shock to individuals.
The sticky phones that you're familiar with, which is actually a fairly complex substance, so it's been around for a while, developed for something quite different.
All the way up to information warfare, which we really felt spun off on its own and has taken on a life of its own independently.
A lot of these things have psychological implications in convincing people that they really don't want to do the kinds of things that you're trying to stop them from doing, rioting or attacking, sniping, whatever that might be.
Well, in Desert Storm, probably the biggest thing we did there was psychological operations.
And as we saw, they turned out to be extremely effective.
If you remember the pictures of tens of thousands of people surrendering, I mean, even surrendering to drones and workers and ready to get quit.
I do.
And part of it was intensive.
Remember, they had fought a war for about eight years with Iran, and one of the things they had learned in that war, basically a ground war, was if you stayed in your tank, you could survive.
And they were not prepared for our precision weapons and our day-night capability to find them and destroy the tanks.
So very quickly, we got that, you know, they found out tanks could be hit, so we'd drop leaflets on them and say, you know, we don't care about you, don't be in your tanks because we're going to destroy them.
Another major operation that was quite successful is to go in and they, again, simple things, dropping leaflets.
And they went to a specific area and they said, do not be here tomorrow because the largest non-nuclear explosion that has ever occurred is going to occur at this site tomorrow.
And then they dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb that has ever been dropped with a huge explosion.
We're at the bottom of the hour, Doctor, so we're going to break here for a moment.
When we come back, I want to ask him about that device versus a fuel-air explosive device, which I had always heard was the next best thing to a nuke for killing.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
Coast to Coast AM from January
Coast to Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
24, 1997.
Coast to Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere inside.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 24th, 1997.
And Doctor, you were talking about a device dropped in Iraq, I take it in the middle of a desert somewhere, the largest non-nuclear explosion ever seen.
Now, I had always heard the fuel-air explosive or the mist that they drop and then ignite, literally igniting or depriving the area of oxygen, was probably the worst thing short of a nuke.
Well, in my estimation, this is just a personal issue, we have created an artificial boundary, and that is one that says nuclear weapons are so special that if you use them, you have crossed a very definite barrier, and that we will not do that except under the most excegent circumstances.
Now, there are unconfirmed reports that one of the things that we told Baghdad, either directly or indirectly, is if they were to use biological weapons, then, you know, the gloves were off.
Right now, I've never seen that officially confirmed, but it's certainly one of the rampant rumors about why you did not see the stockpiles that we know Saddam had being used.
Well, of course, the whole series of information warfare, i.e.
putting viruses in virtually every nation, even in the developing countries, their economic systems, their transportation systems, air traffic control, communication systems are all run by computers.
Oh, that's true.
So bringing them down, it is true that you can harden systems, but you pay a tremendous price for that.
And so it's much like we did with the Soviets, it's just too expensive to harden everything, so you can't protect them.
Tremendous amounts of pulse power induced into electrical grids we know will burn out selected electrical equipment.
And one of the things we have now, of course, is with precision weapons, you can fly very close to your target so that electrical pulse can be produced by standard explosives as well as by nuclear.
It's just more exaggerated in the nuclear one.
And that of course we found out after World War II as kind of an unexpected side effect.
But you get a huge footprint.
One of the problems with such systems is that you've got to be quite a ways away from them yourselves or you have this tremendous retroside issue because your equipment can be as subjected to the pulse as is the adversaries.
Is there work being done on the ability to produce a directed pulse of the kind we're talking about, short of a nuclear explosion or a conventional iron bomb or smart bomb, you know, dropped on transformers?
I've heard, for example, that it is, they're working on a device.
The police are, for the police in this country, to be able to disable a speeding or fleeing vehicle by somehow pulsing it with something that will simply shut its entire electrical system down.
And I'm very skeptical of the people who say they can do that.
And that comes from a lot of years of looking at that sort of problem.
And the problem is this.
Electrical systems, even from one car to another, vary tremendously.
And it also varies even more so if you start looking at diesel engines, for instance.
When we have tested various electronic equipment, we find tremendous variability from one system, from one identical piece in a system to an identical piece in another system.
In other words, the same pulse to the same type of equipment does not respond the same way every time.
The other issue that you have is the one that I mentioned earlier, and that's fratricide.
If I have a pulse that will wipe out the car that I'm chasing, it'll probably get mine and all of the other cars that are just coincidentally in the area.
I'm very skeptical of that.
I keep hearing tremendous claims, and I have yet to see it work where law enforcement agencies would be comfortable using them.
I was imagining its use on a tough and frustrating day on the L.A. freeways.
So all of this really is still very much in development and not necessarily practical yet.
I mean, you've described a weapon here that really, because of the problem that you would do it to yourself, it's not very practical, very difficult to use.
On the other hand, if you could bring it in, bring the weapon in and leave it like a time bomb so that it would go off and then get the hell out of the way, then it might have some application.
Doctor, you know, you talk about the information-rich societies, societies that depend for their infrastructure on computers.
I can't think of any that is more dependent than we are.
So if we're designing this technology, and if you look at the world in general, it seems to me we are one of the richest targets for this kind of technology, maybe the richest in the world.
And the problem that you run into here is a question of how much security do you want and how much of your civil rights are you willing to trade off to obtain that?
If I had a large weapon capable of pulsing, even if it was pretty good size, if I could get it somewhere near the Pentagon or an important computer record center, I could do some very, very serious damage that would make the conventional truck bomb look like a firecracker.
The targets you selected there happen to be ones that tend to be very hardened because they are aware of it if you go to the key target.
But if I were to go, as you know, here in Las Vegas, we have something, you know, Bank America down here.
All of financial transactions, for instance, tend to be, that are not through the federal government per se are really vulnerable.
All the telecommunications systems, again, that don't belong to the government, you know, the backup systems that are there for national emergencies, all the commercial ones, they're the ones that are vulnerable and they handle the bulk of the information load in the country.
The audio feed that goes from here to Oregon and then back to the East Coast was routed through there, and we were off the air for quite some number of hours before they got everything rerouted.
So it affected a very great deal with communications.
I think terrorism is going to be a very cost-effective way if you're an adversary.
I think that Desert Storm was tremendously effective, but it also sent a message around the world that if you want to test us, you don't do it head to head.
Do you have any information on how far Saddam has come since the war with regard to rebuilding, restructuring, lessons learned, and what he might have in mind?
Well, the latter, I don't think anybody knows what he has in mind.
And I only see the same reports that you do that he has certainly rebuilt his conventional forces to a degree more than we had anticipated that he would be able to in that period of time.
And of course, the constant reports that he had certainly chemical and biological capabilities and may be in fact continuing to do so.
He's certainly not played by the rules that were laid down to him.
I'm going to ask you to put yourself in a very difficult position, but it might be an interesting exercise, or maybe you should not do it, I don't know.
But if you were on the other side and you were wanting to attack this country with some massive non-lethal technology that would do great harm, what would you do and where would you attack?
or you can refuse to answer that yeah that's one i think i know enough about the systems and the vulnerability that i'd like i would choose the the opponents to figure that out for themselves i see I don't blame you.
This is a very sensitive subject because the things we're talking about, you want specifics on them, but you can't exactly give them.
What is the latest that you can tell us that we're working on that we could use short of the iron bombs and the lots of steel on target, as you were talking about?
Well, the technologies that are being worked on are really on a very wide scale.
And I think that one of the things you need to look at is what's the kind of operations are we going to be involved in?
Because the things we've been discussing here primarily address mid-to-high intensity war.
And that cannot be neglected.
Having said that, the whole area of peace support operations, which range from peacekeeping, peacemaking, humanitarian operations, you can argue whether or not we should be involved.
And certainly those arguments go on inside the military.
And my position on that is that we have been involved in peace support operations, we are involved in peace support operations, and we will be.
What that means is that there are a wide range of such operations for which we just need to be able to control people, at the same time protecting our forces.
Situations like Somalia, like Haiti, like Bosnia, and others that are going to emerge.
And so simple kinds of things.
We overlook, for instance, the situation in which I have a friendly crowd, and friendly crowds can hurt you.
I have friends who were in Haiti after the uphold democracy, and the troops are on the ground, and one of the big problems with dumping trash.
You see the videotapes of here are people that are so destitute that they will swarm over and fight voraciously for the ability to pick through our trash.
And so what happened is you needed a way for the troops to dump the trash and get out of there before that happened.
You certainly didn't want to shoot people whose only offense was to try to get to your trash before somebody else did.
I am very, very interested in lasers, and I'm also very interested in whether they have application from space yet, or whether you think they will, or whether our atmosphere will so diffuse the power of a laser as to make it useless from orbit.
That's a point of fascination for me, so we will talk about that when we come back.
All right, Doctor, stand by.
My guest is generally known as the father of non-lethal weapons.
How's that for a title?
He is Dr. John Alexander.
He's in Las Vegas, not far from where I am here in the high desert.
I'm Art Bell.
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You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
Coast to Coast AM from January
24, 1997.
Coast to Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
Coast to Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
Freebier Radio Networks presents Art Bells Somewhere in Time, tonight's program originally aired January 24th, 1997.
He's generally known as the father of non-lethal weapons in the world, in the West, which means the world, because we lead the world in this kind of technology.
And in a moment, we are going to discuss lasers.
The End The End All right, I guess I better get this on the air from Hawaii.
Art for your many, many fans in Hawaii, and I've had a lot of faxes, KHVH has gone off the air in Honolulu in the middle of your program for the past two nights.
They're going to do it again tonight.
I suspect some Art Bell fans have been surrounding the station with burning torches, threatening to torture.
Well, tonight, the station read a statement apologizing for cutting off your program, begging our indulgence.
They explained they're having transmitter adjustments to make.
With your many years in radio, could you please explain to your Hawaii fans why it is necessary to shut the whole station down for three nights in a row to work on the transmitter?
I have refrained from making a nasty call myself, but I'm sure the poor folks at KHVH have gotten an awful earful.
Aloha.
Yeah, sure I can.
Look, radio stations are complex electronic mechanisms that include transmitters and links and microwave and all the rest of it.
And occasionally, it is necessary to do electronic maintenance lest there be a failure.
Sometimes that will require several days in a row of shutting off in the middle of the night.
Sometimes they replace transmitters.
Sometimes they clean them out.
Sometimes they do antenna work.
Indulge them because that is what keeps it on the air the rest of the time.
So douse your torches, folks, and thank them for carrying the program.
And please indulge them with respect to the electronic work they've got to do.
And do not call them and make nasty calls.
They are doing this so that in the end, it will be more dependable.
Take it easy there in Hawaii.
Back now to Dr. John Alexander, considered to be the father, the father of non-lethal weapons, I guess, in the world.
And, Doctor, we were about to talk about lasers.
And I am particularly interested in lasers.
I've got a little bitty one that I got from one of my sponsors, Seacrain Company, and my cats love it.
You know, it's a little dot that races around the room, and the cats chase it thinking it's a little red bug.
I suspect there may be more to lasers than amusing cats.
But actually, the little red dot turns out to be very effective.
But lasers, of course, are a very, very broad topic and have brought conferences on whether or not we should have lasers on the battlefield.
There are those who would ban them altogether, which I think is ridiculous.
But nonetheless, you do have people who would take that position.
The fear, of course, is that lasers are going to be used as blinding systems.
And one of the things I always say that eyeballs and testicles are emotional issues.
We don't listen to a lot of facts when we talk about them.
And so the idea that you might have systems that blind is of quite a bit of concern.
And the answer is there are lasers that could be put on the battlefield that could blind.
Now, we also know that lasers are used in our ranging systems.
Remember from, again, Desert Storm, how we were able to hit the tanks with that accuracy had to do with laser range finders that could tell us exactly where they were.
Also, you have precision-guided systems, and sometimes that guidance is a laser spot.
So I just do not see the potential for taking them off the battlefield.
I do not see them equally being used as a system to cause mass blindness.
I think that would be patently illegal, and such systems would be terminated to be illegal under all the treaties and conventions that we have.
If you could blind an enemy, effectively taking him out, requiring assistance from somebody who still has their eyesight, you've taken two people off the battlefield and you have not killed.
So why is that inhumane compared to dropping a 2,000-pound bomb and blowing people into little bitty pieces?
Some people don't know it, but you know the M16 rifle that we brought in during the Vietnam era.
Before that, we had the AR-15, and initially, the bullet that was fired from that was barely stable.
And the point was that as it would go through the air, it would start to tumble.
And it was banned.
They had to come up with a higher power one that had more stability because the tumbling system would probably not kill you, but it would cause excessive damage.
It would tear limbs Off and whatnot.
So that would be considered maiming.
I mean, the whole set of rules, you know, I can stick you, and I can burn you if I intend to kill you.
Oh, well, we've had conferences and treaties have been set up by all the Western nations.
Red Cross is deeply involved.
Of course, now the UN, before that, the earlier organizations.
And we have a whole series of things called the laws of land warfare that have been agreed to.
Many of them came out after World War I, of course.
The whole issue on chemical weapons because of the abhorrence of what we saw from mustard gas that we used in trench warfare then.
You know, we have the problem now that, and this occurred in Waco, of course, where there are agents that you can use against our own civilian populations that cannot be used in war.
And it was while he was on the approach to the airport, and I think it was December 95 that the order went out to stop the hotels here from flashing them about.
Well, let me address that because there are things that can be done with lasers that are eye-safe.
In other words, rather than working on blinding the pilot, per se, against the eyeballs, you can take a continuous wave laser, use it against the cockpit.
And as you know, inside the cockpit, there really are little tiny fractures.
So as the light hit, it diffracts, meaning the pilot cannot see outside.
Now, you haven't damaged his eyeballs or not, but these are bright enough, and we did this when I was at Los Alamos, that you can, you're familiar with the heads-up display or the HUD.
You can take that away because of so much illumination on the outside.
So if a pilot were trying to attack a target, they just couldn't see it very well.
It's a very good method for warning.
It's one of the things, one of the NATO studies I was involved in was non-lethal means for working on non-cooperative aircraft.
Basically, how do you enforce a no-fly zone?
And it turns out there's a lot of reasons to transit a no-fly zone.
I won't go into all of those sorts of things.
Most of them are economic.
So if you have a situation where a pilot's flying through there, one of the things you want to do is warn them.
And this was a technology that we said would be very effective.
You put the spot on there, and the pilot would know without a doubt that they have been taken under surveillance, and if they continue, they'll probably get a rocket at the tailpipe.
It would have been a good alternative, if you remember what happened with Vincennes with the Airbus incident.
I think the best bet for space-based systems or even high-altitude systems are things like missile defense.
And the idea is not to try and burn holes through the atmosphere.
What you were alluding to before is exactly right.
Atmosphere causes big problems.
The lower you get, the more power it takes, the more potential it is to dissipate the energy.
However, if you're firing laterally, say against ICBMs that are being launched, it's probably going to be effective in those areas.
There was a model that was done looking at airborne lasers, you know, it's the airborne laser lab that the Air Force now has, but looking down, and you've got to control for something like 29 different variables.
And things like the amount of moisture in the atmosphere, wind, temperature gradients, I mean, the list just goes on and on.
So to use them effectively, I think the problem is if you attempt to do it, then your power requirements go up, and then you've got to have huge power sources.
Again, I think the way you use them on high-altitude platforms is laterally.
I've also seen it done, and I forget whether it was at Los Alamos or White Sands or somewhere or another, they actually showed on television a demonstration of a missile blown up in mid-flight in the atmosphere from the ground.
What doesn't make sense to me is you tell me we can use lasers in space and make lateral shots at ICBMs that might be, for example, in a boost phase and bring them down.
And we are not doing that, or at least publicly we're not doing it.
Well, it is true, isn't it, that a kinetic weapon, in other words, something that would approximate a shotgun shell, extraordinaire, fired at something, it would only take a little tiny thing the size of a BB kinetically to hit this thing and disable it and blow it up.
The reason I say that is that not because of any belief of how effective it is.
I think that the remote viewing is an appropriate intelligence gathering tool.
I do think that many of us we haven't discussed in non-lethal weapons, they have tremendous implications for intelligence both before and after.
But I do think it's a viable tool that should be used in conjunction with other tools.
I think one of the big problems that the military had is that remote viewing units were used as a court of last resort if there were just no other way to get the information they needed.
And then they wanted to know who, what, when, why, where.
And no other system they had would give them that.
So you would not expect a fledgling system such as remote viewing to provide those kind of data.
Well, I think the conspiracy theorists will not be terribly happy with a lot of my answers.
But the real answer is when you're looking at trying to affect people at a distance, it is extremely difficult.
We have looked for the Holy Grail for I don't know how long, and that would be some kind of system that could induce an instantaneous catatonic state.
I say that as opposed to just relaxing them.
Are you familiar with the dead man switch?
You know, where the terrorist holds the hand grenade with the pinpole, so if he relax, it still goes off.
The problem with trying to incapacitate people quickly is that if you do it, say, chemically, which has certainly been looked at quite a bit, either through darts or gas or whatever, there is too much variability in human makeup.
Most of these things operate based on body weight and health condition.
So a substance that would stop a say a 200-pound man that's in good condition would easily kill a lot of other people.
As we saw in Waco, when they did that, what we found out was that Quresh's had a better speaker system, and they just turned their music up and kept the HRT up late at night.
So I think the idea, remember we tried that with Noriega as well during Just Cause.
He was trapped in the nunsio and played rock music, which certainly irritated a lot of people, but that was certainly not the force that brought him out of the building.
What we're talking about now in acoustic weapons, though, are systems that will actually vibrate you to the point where people can collapse.
Now, the issue is that they'd be able to get back up or, out of their own volition, leave the area.
So it's not a loud noise.
There's too many countermeasures.
The quickest one, of course, is just put your fingers in your ears.
However, you've touched on, I think, an area that is one of the major ones that must be addressed, and that is how do you measure effectiveness?
We understand hard bombs and bullets pretty well.
We understand a burning hole out in the desert.
We don't understand the tank isn't moving.
Does that mean it's really dead?
Can these things come back to life?
There are many non-lethal weapons that are really quite effective on the low end, the kinds of anti-personnel things.
We know how to deal with them and how to measure it pretty well.
When you get into the anti-materiel systems, the larger ones, very difficult if I want to measure how much information is moving, how much electricity is available, how much fuel is available, what the quality is of it, and those sorts of things.
Well, we've talked about a number of weapons, and a lot of them, lasers, not effective through the atmosphere, sound effective, but you can hold your ears.
And so, in a lot of ways, they don't seem effective.
Psychological weapons, yes, effective, I suppose, prior to something that, but then again, you've got to have the backup and be prepared to use the real weapons if you're really going to mix it up.
So what would you classify, if you were to lay out the most effective non-lethal weapons that you could use, what would they be?
We left that one a little early, and I'd like to give you an example of what was done in Somalia.
One of the major problems we had there were snipers, and what would happen is the snipers would be surrounded by willing hostages, namely women and children.
And up until that time, our response was just to shoot everybody.
I mean, we'd bring in helicopters with mini-guns, and we killed lots and lots of folks.
One of the things that was done with a laser out of Kirtland Air Force Base was being able to bring in a laser spot, and it's much like what you've seen in the movie.
You talked about the red dot before, having the cat around.
Remember in the movies where you have the prison riots and the red dot goes on the guy's chest and they go, oh, you mean me?
Same thing was used in Somalia.
Again, this was at the time when we were handing the exfiltration.
A story that's told by the Town of Island who had the system there.
They had a green laser and they were shining it and they spotted a mortar crew a couple of kilometers away and they were setting up inside a building and they put the laser spot through there and they had four people come over to the window with their hands up trying to surrender to it.
Well, it's a very effective attention-getting thing to do.
That's right.
If you see a red dot on your chest, it has deep meaning.
And so you're saying that even in a crowd where you might have shields being used, which is much the case in the kind of warfare we seem to be conducting, you can single out the person you really want and say, stop that.
They had several, they were able to stop the sniping just by putting a spot out there, and they had several cases where they spotted the person with a rifle, you put the laser on him, and again, these are ISAFE lasers, they do no physical damage to him, but the idea that this person has been pointed out, and they obviously know there are lethal backups, was sufficient to stop them.
There are many systems that are really quite effective.
I think the law enforcement agencies around the country, I've had the SWAT team here in Las Vegas actually use for a demonstration one of the television programs that you mentioned.
And these are best in a scenario that is a little bit slow developing, not one where the officer on the street suddenly bumps into somebody.
But we have a hostage barricade situation.
As you know, we have those periodically.
Somebody's irate and threatening their neighbors and going in and they shoot them with wooden bullets.
The alternative, of course, is to shoot them with real bullets.
And they said, usually the next day, after they've calmed down, they come in and thank them for being alive.
It's just a matter of it's fired from a device like a grenade launcher, a standard grenade launcher, and it's about a 40 millimeters and 38 to 40 millimeter wood round.
And it's just a tremendous thud.
I've got a picture taken in the San Jose, Mercury, where you can see the individual getting hit.
He's chasing the police officers with an axe.
And as he gets hit, I mean, it literally rocks him back so his heels are off the ground.
So it backs quite a thud, and you'll definitely have a bruise the next morning, but most likely not be dead.
Again, I've read a good bit of the literature from it.
I'll tell you one thing, and again, I think the conspiracy theorists will not like this answer, but having been in the agency and talking to senior people, one of the lessons or things that they learned from that is not something that they would want to touch.
In my estimation, in talking to people who either were involved or close to such operations, they believe that the political mood of such or of the country and the certainly leaders on the hill, anybody who participates in that is playing you bet your agency.
And I would also say, remember, talking about big organizations, you still find individuals.
And I find usually it is younger people who didn't live through that era who come in and say, well, wouldn't it be great if we had some kind of mystical agent, you know, magic dust or something like that, that we could sprinkle over and incapacitate people.
But the people who lived through it, and I've been counseled by some pretty senior folks there, said not something they would undertake.
They think the repercussions from Congress would be swift and severe.
It's been a long time, Doctor, since we've been in a really serious war.
Now, I'm not saying Desert Storm was not serious.
It certainly was.
But it turned out the enemy did not have the ability to resist as we thought they might.
In other words, they collapsed rather easily.
If we get into another serious war, let us say trouble on the Korean Peninsula comes to mind, something at that level, how long do you think these non-lethal devices would be used before the real people in power, the generals, said, forget that?
I don't think that's a situation in which you would use non-lethal under any circumstances.
And in the policy that was signed by the Deputy Secretary of Defense, one of the things that's made clear is even if we have non-lethal weapons, we reserve the right to use lethal weapons first.
It doesn't mean that we will necessarily have a gradiated response.
My point is that I believe that the nature of conflict has basically changed.
I believe there are still bad actors.
Saddam is out there.
Iran is a danger.
North Korea is a danger.
There are others in the world who could be a major conventional threat.
And for them, you need an absolutely highly lethal, highly mobile force.
Having said that, we also have these emerging threats, many of whom don't have an address.
And therein is where you really have a problem.
If you're fighting a standard army, rule one is we win, but we know how to do that.
You might get hurt in the process, but we're going to win.
But we have a whole host of emerging threats.
And I'll give you an example, something like the Kali cartel.
If you say drug cartels are a threat to national interests, how do you respond to that?
And I think our response so far has been not very effective.
But you can't go bomb the Kali cartel.
They're resident Inside the sovereign state of Colombia.
They have an agricultural system, a manufacturing and distribution system that runs through many, many countries.
And we've got to remember, part of them are us.
So to try and bring force against adversaries such as these is going to be difficult.
Organized crime in the future, if not already today, is beyond the capability of law enforcement agencies to deal with it.
And I think, well, I've got memos from the Bureau and CIA and others who have met up.
This is a trillion-dollar economy, bigger than most of the countries in the world.
How do you bring force against such entities in the future?
And my guest is Dr. John Alexander, and we're about to go to the phones.
If you have questions regarding non-lethal weapons, he has been called the father of non-lethal weapons, probably in the world.
Dr. Alexander organized and chaired the first two major conferences on non-lethal warfare, served as a U.S. delegate to three NATO studies on the topic, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations non-lethal warfare study, and has a resume as long as several arms.
Academically, an M.A. from Pepperdine University, Ph.D., Walden University, and later attended the Anderson School of Management at UCLA, the Sloan School at MIT, the Kennedy School of Government, General Officer Program, National and International Security for Senior Executives at Harvard, and on and on and on.
And we'll get back to him in a moment.
All right, here we go.
Once again, Dr. John Alexander, the subject, non-lethal weapons, weapons you can use that will disable or accomplish a goal for you, including at the national level with regard to infrastructure and all the rest of it, but not kill.
It is an interesting topic, and here once again is Dr. Alexander.
Doctor, we've got a lot of people who would like to ask you questions.
Basically, well, if you really want a complete record of the program, including maybe where you have that picture, a guy by the name of Jim Schnobel has just written a book called Remote Viewers.
It's in paperback, has just come out within the week, and really tells the entire history of both remote viewing and psychokinetic work, which pretty much has dissipated.
The individual, to show you how enthused he was, he put it down and said, I wish that hadn't happened.
And fortunately, we were sequestered and were able to kind of put him back together before he went home.
And learned afterwards that he tried it again on his own and was able to do it once more and then said, that's enough.
Want to stress, I had a quick talk with Penn Gillette here this week, who decided not to talk anymore.
You know, him and Penn and Teller, who are real naysayers, of course.
The individuals involved are strictly naive.
They didn't even know they were coming to do, you know, that they would be involved in these sorts of things, had no expectation of it happening, certainly no trickery involved.
Contrary to popular statements, we have had magicians.
I had Doug Henning over at the house, and other magicians have looked at it.
But the fact that it works at all, even sometimes, has got to be a source of intense fascination for those who would turn it into or wish to turn it into some kind of weapon.
There's still a substantial number of people who said it can't be, therefore it isn't.
I have told this story to people who look at me and just say, crap, you know, you're lying.
And say, well, that's one possibility.
However, as I said, in this case, we had about 30 highly qualified observers, and it wasn't a demonstration for people.
It happened to one of them.
There is, of course, the giggle factor.
That's real.
There are, you know, the things that happened with particular General Stubblebein over it certainly led people who were tacitly supportive to stay out of the line of fire.
First time caller line, you're on the air with Dr. John Alexander.
unidentified
Hi.
Good morning, Art.
Good morning, Dr. Alexander.
Hi.
I've got a couple things I'd like to say.
One, it needs to be addressed to you, Art, dealing with Dr. Alexander.
But, Art, you've got some vomits on your line you need to get taken care of.
I've been trying to call you for about four weeks on both the west of the Rockies line, your Watts line, and else by the way, 14 rings, got this robot female that comes on the line and says, you know, sir, everybody suffers.
You need to get that off your line.
But now, Dr. Alexander, for you, at the top of the program, you were talking about they were experimenting with this device to disable a motor vehicle.
Now, this is getting a little far-fetched, but I've seen a flying saucer too in my lifetime.
I'm 47 years old.
But one phenomenon that is associated very greatly with flying saucers is car failures.
The electrical goes dead.
Now, everybody is theorizing that most likely this is being caused by some sort of a high-intensity magnetic field being generated by the ship's propulsion system, etc., etc.
Would this be some, you know, if the technology was developed, would this be possible to have this put aboard a police car without disabling a police car's engine also and crippling everybody on the highway for about a half a mile run, you know, like some sort of a close proximity high-intensity disruptor beam or something?
Well, in the UFO literature, of course, stopping engines is a common topic.
One difference between using electrical pulse systems that we were talking about and what you hear with the UFOs is the engines come back on.
The engines that are stopped with electrical pulse power don't come out because the reason they stop is that you have burned out one of the components of the engine.
Doctor, were you aware there is a regulation that allows with 30 days' notice for the United States to experiment biologically or chemically on civilian populations with 30 days' notice to local authorities?
If you get back to even when we were doing simple things like remote viewing and psychokinesis work, we always had what was called a human use board.
Now we're all aware of certain misapplications that have been done in testing in the past, but my experience was that these boards were terribly conservative and you really had to demonstrate to both technically sophisticated people and lay people what you were going to do and that anybody who was involved understood the risks.
That's why I'd be really surprised if you were going to do it on any large-scale population.
No, we're getting a bit far afield from things that I, you know, that my personal experience has always been that boards and things have tended to be conservative.
Having said that, I acknowledge, I mean, you'd be naive if you didn't say there have been abuses.
Quick recap on you talking about lasers and things like that.
I think the main problem with that is one still is cost, packaging, and then of course you would need a large platform, and then the reliability factor and of course the countermeasures.
But kind of leading into some of the other is what are the possibilities of some sort of electronic system that could induce temporary sickness, change weather patterns, or create headaches, disorientations, things like that, i.e.
Okay, now the reason I brought that up, and this gets into, this is back to the esoteric side, if you will, and not directly at heart, but there's a concept of orgone energy.
And I have seen certainly some videotapes, and Trevor James Constable, I think, now lives out in Hawaii, used to be in Long Beach, did some very, very interesting work, both anchoring storms and moving them around.
To be involved in weather modification, there are international treaties that get to be extremely difficult because, as you know, if I cause rain to fall in one place, that means it's not going to fall someplace else.
You're not really making rain.
We're only discussing where the precipitation is going to occur.
And so, in general, we've said we will not screw with the weather patterns because the implications, of course, are horrendous.
I have only tangential knowledge of HARP, but to the best of my knowledge, that's for something that's really quite different.
I believe we're looking at communications issues and some other technical things as opposed to I certainly do not see it as a weather modification issue.
They're fairly embryonic in our understanding of them.
But I have seen sufficient evidence to say an area that's fairly promising.
Again, one of the reasons that most companies or agencies won't get involved is that the treaty requirements, if you're just going to do simple things like cloud seeding, for instance, you've got to go to NOAA and file what your intentions are and that.
Okay, speaking as a United States Air Force veteran and a veteran of Vietnam, voluntary, by the way, I have, and someone who believes in national sovereignty of the United States of America, I have a question directly that doesn't relate to these weapons, but to the doctor on his affiliation with the Council on Foreign Relations, whose stated objective, published objective, is to eliminate the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.
How can you possibly, with your affiliation with the military and your oaths you've taken to defend, preserve, protect, defend the Constitution, how could you possibly belong to an organization which publicly brags about the fact that it wants to move us toward a one-world government and wants to eliminate the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?
I think that most people have no idea what the Council on Foreign Relations is, and most of this stuff comes under absolute nonsense.
You will find, as we did on the Council, the study that I was involved in, people of many, many different opinions.
They are certainly not a monolithic organization that has any particular area.
They have fierce internal debates, getting our report out the door after the study group had met and even deciding what they wanted to say in general took another eight months just of back and forth getting things approved.
I just kind of reject.
I have little time for all the tremendous conspiracy theories.
They can come up with more conspiracies than anybody could possibly answer.
I'll tell you, maybe after the, if you bring this up, I know we're going to go to break here in just a second.
My guest is Dr. John Alexander, generally known as the father of non-lethal weapons, and yes, associated with the Council on Foreign Relations Non-Lethal Warfare Study.
So we'll talk a little bit about that.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell, Somewhere in Time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
Music by Ben Thede
Premier Radio Networks presents Art Bell Somewhere in Time.
Tonight's program originally aired January 24th, 1997.
It's obviously a group of highly credentialed, well-thought-out people who look at issues of what our foreign relations should be with other nations in the world.
They are made up of people of many persuasions, Republicans and Democrats and conservatives and liberals.
And I certainly did not see any indication of one mindset or any goal or anything that was anti-American in any way, shape, or form.
Let me go to what I think is a fundamental problem here.
And this will probably generate a lively discussion, and you can guide me as to how lively you're prepared to take it.
But the answer to that question is a simple no.
I think what we're seeing in the various conspiracy theories in general, and the reason I say it's a strategic problem, because it does impact at that level, is a fundamental fault in the American educational system.
We just fail to teach people how to think, tell them a lot about what to think, but how to go in and critically analyze complex problems.
We know, compared to education in Europe, for instance, where you have to learn about the rest of the world, we are so egocentric that we just think the world should revolve around us.
When I was at Command General Staff College, my tablemate was from Pakistan, a brilliant guy.
But one of his complaints was, you know, he said, I watch the three network news broadcasts, and all they do is they say the same thing over and over.
If I want to find out anything about what's going on in my entire area of the world that encompasses at least 40% of the population of the world, he says, I do not get it anywhere on American news.
You know, we worry about the United States, a little bit about Europe, and maybe Japan.
We've watched that over and over again in Central and South America.
It's something we worry about when we have nothing better to do, but even our closest neighbors are not something that we worry very much about.
And when I talked before about the potential for conventional threats that are out there, a rearmed Russia or subset of the former Soviet Union is not out of the question.
This time last year, I was in the United States Army, stationed in Haiti with Operation Uphold Democracy.
Oh.
I was a shotgunner at that time, and we used the non-lethal ammunition.
But the biggest problem I saw with it was the fact that there were plenty of times when we could have used it.
Devices such as the Flash Bang, which is just a crowd control device.
It doesn't even actually affect any one person.
But it seemed that our chain of command was unwilling to let us use these.
And with the graduated response system, it seems like that by the time that we could have actually used any of these ammunitions, that it'd been more time for lethal ammunitions and that it might actually do more harm than good.
Well, he's pointed to, I think, what's one of the critical issues.
Having the weapons and having effective ones are only a small part of the puzzle.
You've got to have doctrine like how are you going to use them and then you've also got to go and have a training program wherein people are trained on the programs.
I had calls from Sink Lamp literally the week before they left saying, what kind of weapons can you give us?
And he's obviously come in a little bit later.
The answer is nothing.
When you're about to embark on a potential invasion, that is not the time to be introducing new weapon systems.
Another issue that's involved, I think this is a chain of command issue, is a matter of confidence.
We understand bullets.
We've been using bullets for centuries, so we understand the effects, and we understand it very, very well.
The weapons that we're talking about now are not as well understood, and so there's going to be a learning curve wherein the chain of command, starting with a grunt, and they're probably some of the most important people, is that they have confidence that if they use a particular weapon, such as bullets or a flashbang or whatever, it's going to work and what kind of effects it's going to be.
I believe that that answer was, in fact, the correct answer.
And I think that's been borne out.
No threat.
Now, you've got to remember where we were at that time.
We were still in Vietnam.
We were worried about the Russian bear.
And, you know, in the military, there's a saying that an action passed is an action handled.
I think the Air Force didn't want to deal with it.
You know, they had too much on their plate and anything that gets one item off, and these would have been basically nuisance.
I know the UFO community doesn't like that.
They like to think they're the center of the universe and that this is of utmost importance.
My experience with most of the military is you'll find many, many people who are believers, supporters, people who had experiences.
But when you get to an institutional level, say, okay, I'm going to make trade-offs, like I'm going to commit resources, and I have, it's a zero-sum game, it just doesn't cut the muster as something that's viewed as terribly important to national security.
And that's why I think, well, that was actually Condon Report is what you're referring to as opposed to Blue Book.
I interviewed a military officer who was in a missile silo control center underground in which a UFO appeared and activated, or more accurately, I'm sorry, deactivated several of our intercontinental-capable ballistic missiles.
Well, of course, there were a whole series of sightings across the area.
One of the things about the Condon report that I find absolutely fascinating is that the recommendations and conclusions are not supported by the body of the text.
If you read the body of the text, you would come out with an answer that says, UFOs are real, and they've been going on.
However, Condon himself did not get involved in the study.
He decided a priori, before the study ever started, this was nonsense and he was going to get it over.
So he wrote it without reading the text.
I have run into not only that case, but I know you're familiar with Bentwater's case.
Wherein some things happened that I certainly would have perceived quite differently and would have viewed as potential threat.
It's my notion that by and large the giggle factor is so high, and I talked to Colonel Halt on this and he sort of confirmed it, that raising the issue to higher headquarters would not be considered career-enhancing.
A natural remote viewer, a guy like Joe McMonagall who had come into the program, who had experiences, and just it indicates somebody with whom you don't have to start with basic training and teaching them how to do it.
What Ed Dames talks about and what evolved for a while in the program was something that Ingo Swan developed, where they set up a very sophisticated and hardcore training program wherein you could take somebody who is not a natural and teach them how to acquire these skills.
So the natural is somebody who just does it on their own.
There's quite a controversy inside the community as to whether naturals or trained people were better.
I'm much more conservative on how I would accept the data.
I think that, and this again is one of the downfalls in the intelligence aspect, was the lack of corroboration, looking at other sorts of evidentiary material and seeing if it makes sense.
And quite frankly, some of these things just don't pass the it makes sense test.
I wish to place a question concerning the effect of some forms of energy put out by either the sun or possibly man via, for example, HAARP on the Earth's extremely hot interior magma.
To make my question understandable, I need to succinctly point out that the sun now is in a sunspot minimum.
However, it is again starting into its next sunspot increased portion of its 22-year cycle.
And on January 6th, a very violent storm with all its energy blew full force accidentally right straight towards Earth.
Will blew out ATT satellites.
Will may have diverted the polar jet that satellite.
You're listening to Ark Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks.
Tonight, an encore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from January 24th, 1997.
Tonight, tonight, we're gonna make it happen.
Tonight, we'll put all of our things right.
We're in the panel and so means some of them We're born for both brothers and night I want to love you, feel you, wrap myself around you I want to see you,
see you, thank you alright We gotta get it right without a bomb We gotta get it right without a pause made
my way And no one paid your way You're listening to Arch Bell somewhere in time on Premier Radio Networks tonight an oncore presentation of Coast to Coast AM from January 24th 1997.
My guest is Dr. John Alexander generally known as the father of non-lethal weapons and we'll get back to him in a moment and we're beginning to go all over the map and that is what occurs when you open the lines and that's just fine that's what we're gonna do I've got a fax here from Major Ed Dames relating to a John Alexander and I will read that in a moment all
All right, the following is from Ed Dames, just came in.
It says, Dear Art, although John is a very spooky guy, that's what he calls you, John, he is certifiably trustable.
You have my word of honor.
It seems, if it seems, that he is skirting issues, it is only because he is plugged into very classified issues.
He will not lie to you.
Again, my word of honor.
Compare martial arts.
Once you use a certain technique, the enemy, or potential enemy, will be on guard for the unique technique that you used.
So, certain techniques must be kept under wraps.
And I guess that would be true.
You said earlier there was about 5% of what you know that you could not talk about.
If you were able to talk about that 5%, would I be surprised, shocked, horrified, what word would you use?
But the kinds of things you probably don't know are, you know, how good is it, and under what circumstances might they be used, and just how efficient, you know, what are the technical specifications, and that sort of thing.
If our government, here's another question for you.
you if our government uh had something some technology it could use in case we had a national crisis anarchy of some sort uh and that information was classified uh would you feel that people had a right to know that, or would you feel the government would rightfully keep that information to itself?
I think the government certainly has the right to keep secrets, and they do.
Having said that, this is going to get back to the educational issue, and I guess I'd be willing to take on that teacher again.
I think he just hasn't gone out and looked at the graduate schools and who's doing hard science there.
But more directly.
large conspiracies tend not to work.
If you had, let's hypothetically say you had magic dust or whatever it is, let's just call it magic dust that could have some mystical kinds of capabilities.
That means that you've got to have large numbers of people over long periods of time that would have access to the information, the planning, and all of those sorts of things.
And it gets down to just doesn't make sense.
The other problem, and I come down on the side actually of being against most classification.
And for this reason, I find generally the people that we fool are ourselves.
Let me give you an example.
I was in one of these NATO meetings, and I'll not be too specific.
One of our allies came up and laid something on the table, a technology, and said, what do you think of this?
And I did know about it and couldn't talk to him about it at all.
And I can tell you, our people absolutely thought that we're the only ones in the world who had figured that out.
And the problem is, I'll give you another, a totally different example, but I was meeting with General Abenson on a different topic.
And we laid some stuff out there, and he says, my God, can we do that?
Can the Soviets do that?
And we said, yeah, probably.
And he said, I didn't know that.
Here was the head of SDI, and we're keeping secrets from him.
And it was not really intentional.
It was just a matter of nobody thought to tell them these are the capabilities.
So if you have the system that you hypothesize, I think it's imperative that you actually have wide knowledge because if we have it, the chances are other people do as well.
That's why I think with some of the more insidious systems that we haven't even got to yet, whether or not you choose to develop them, you'd better understand them so you can have countermeasures.
Petroleum products are needed by all militaries to move.
Now, one thing you've got to remember, these act quite slowly.
We're talking about something that's going to take a few months.
You're not going to go out and sprinkle bugs on the battlefield and have all of the gasoline get eaten up in a short period of time.
That's not the way it's going to work.
But as a strategic system, if I wanted to degrade, say, a country's entire oil supply, you could do that over, you know, inoculate it and have this happen over a long period of time.
Remember, these very same bugs that I'm describing are treatment of choice in oil slicks.
We want them.
They're considered good.
They're considered bad if you talk about it in another context.
Randy has been putting together, I don't know what it's up to.
It started out as a $10,000 challenge to anybody who could produce a psychic event.
And I think they're now up in excess of half a million dollars with backers that are pledged from other groups that supposedly will give him the money.
The problem is I have not seen the actual writing for some time, but he sent me a letter once that said if I just read his book, I'd be saved.
And in that, he had a copy of the challenge.
And the challenge is written in such a, I mean, it in and of itself is a magician's trick.
You know, the black research that was being conducted by the National Reconnaissance Office under the National Security Agency, which probably gets about as black as it can get.
I mean, it follows up on some of the observations in the book, The Body Electric, by Dr. Becker, the VA.
And he expressed concern on secret naval experimentation following up on the principles of the Soviet LIDA machine.
That is, you know, I separate two RF carriers at the whole body or brain cage resonance.
You separate those two carriers by 10 to 15 hertz, which, you know, the brain delta waves, you induce sleep.
And he spoke of a whole auditorium of people being put to sleep by relatively low power.
And he was concerned because they were also experimentation at sinus heart rhythm frequencies, in which case they were able to get some effect there.
And audio modulation, of course, the neurophone operates on these principles, getting test subjects to hear voices in their heads.
You know, if a person doesn't say there might not be a political overview of this, and of course I understand that we have to understand what a potential enemy might be able to do.
But looking at the possibilities of HARP, and I think you're stonewalling this person that called before the break and talking to ARP during the break is indicative there that, I mean, this might be one of those classified areas, but I think the general public has a right to know that, you know, there are capabilities in this area and be warned, don't you?
I did hear, let me answer at least as I understood it, because I heard him talk about the LIDA device, which was brought out back in the battle days of the Cold War and looked at it and did look like it had some capabilities.
That was used in the Soviet Union as a, I believe, part of a medical therapy, actually.
People were sitting in front of it and they saw low-level effects.
Frankly, I think that's Ross 80, who is the one who did the work on that, and I have not heard any more on it in almost a decade.
I used to work at a shipyard, and I worked on a naval barge called the Empress, or Empress II.
And the words that come out since then, it was a simulator, or actually a radiator.
It radiated electromagnetic pulse.
Now, I've never seen the thing operate it.
The only feedback I've heard about is something about killing fish in the Gulf of Mexico one time.
I don't know what was about that.
What I would like to ask, Dr. Alexander, is does this electromagnetic pulse, as far as it harms electronics or polarizes conductive materials in it, is vacuum tube or analog electronics more susceptible than digital, CMOS, TTL, or anything else?
And as a matter of fact, if there was an EMP pulse without really good hardening, about the only standing stuff that would still be working would be the vacuum tube stuff.
The old stuff.
And I wonder if they're beginning to stockpile some of the old stuff for exactly that reason.
Maybe we'll go back and manufacture tubes again.
Wildcard line, you're on the air with Dr. John Alexander.
We are going to a break now, so the good doctor and I will secretly pass information back and forth during the break about the CFR and then come back and talk about it.
Doctor, stand by.
We'll be right back to you.
unidentified
You're listening to Art Bell somewhere in time.
Tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
Coast AM from January
24, 1997.
Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
Coast AM from January 24, 1997.
Thank you.
You're listening to Arkbell, somewhere in time, tonight featuring a replay of Coast to Coast AM from January 24th, 1997.
Then it's a good moment then to ask you about what is purported to be the biggest and best UFO story ever involving a cover-up that has gone on for years and years and years and according to you would be impossible to cover up.
And that would be Roswell.
Do you think something real happened at Roswell, real in terms of a UFO, or do you think that it is just sort of some sort of modern legend that has grown?
I have got to believe from a number of first-hand witnesses that certainly something happened.
It strikes me as that the mogul balloon story does not answer the questions and that the Air Force certainly did not serve itself well in the way it responded to Congressman Schiff.
But then to transition and say, what was it, I don't know.
However, to suggest that something really did happen or that an event really did occur, and I agree with you with regard to the response to Schiff, I mean, a lot of records they simply admitted were destroyed, missing, destroyed.
And certainly getting, you can do it with acetone or halons or getting any kind of something that basically gets in and stops the combustion system from operating.
Getting the concentrations necessary on the ground are more feasible.
Having said that, one of the problems is with most of the systems, all they have to do is wait for the gas to dissipate and you can turn it back on again.
There are things that can go in and just burn up the engine, which is more effective if you're not worried about what happens to the engine.
Some people worry about doing this in the air, and the problem there is a density issue.
Getting the concentrations necessary at the right place at the right time is exceedingly difficult.
On the subject of non-destructive weapons, isn't it intriguing the reports of abduction cases, you know, how they go, stating the silver wand used to help subdue the perhaps unwilling abductee.
It's just a thought, you know, from all the stories you read from anywhere from TV shows, tabloids, books, and things like that.
It kind of seems like if this is true, it would be a non-destructive weapon.
Well, there are, Doctor, are there not the equivalent of silver wands, certainly, that when they touch somebody would disable a biological electrical system?
Well, the wand, fortunately I'm familiar with both fields.
But the wands that I'm familiar with that disrupt the electrical circuitry do it fairly violently.
And I know the people at Air Taser have a system that puts in an electrical shock, and they said they stop doing demonstrations because it looks like the floppy chicken, and it's kind of not, doesn't look as sophisticated as they would like it to.
Well, no, it really looks worse than it does, but what you're doing is short-circuiting the neural system and so that the body, the individual has no control over their body, so it tends to just jerk about.
And I called you before the last time and mentioned that I was an acquaintance of a gentleman that had claimed to have been one of the first advisors into Vietnam.
Do you remember that call many moons ago?
Yes, sir.
And his claim was that he was with the CIA in a military setting and that he had seen at the Pentagon some paperwork regarding Project Blue Book, and he maintains that contact had been made.
And I was just wondering what the doctor had to say.
That contact had been made actually many years ago and that that was a pretty known fact amongst the higher-ups in Washington.
And I just wanted to see what the doctor had to say.
Well, I'll do that, and I'll give you a gratuitous anecdote that some will find interesting.
I don't believe that contact has been made or anything like this.
The comment on it that says that none of this is real is that Tom Clancy is a pretty good friend of mine, and he's not a supporter of these unusual areas, so I ping him from time to time.
And we were, you know, he owns the Baltimore Orioles, so we were there watching a game and chit-chatting about these things.
And I said, well, you know, what about UFOs?
He says, well, it's simple or not.
And he said, we asked specifically about Roswell and if we had it.
West of the Rockies, although there is then the Goldwater conversation with a general that was very interesting, and I've got Barry Goldwater on tape who made inquiries about Roswell and was shut down very quickly.
I don't know if you're familiar with that or not, but I actually have that on audio tape.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Dr. John Alexander.
unidentified
Yes, this is Pete and Portland.
Good evening, gentlemen.
Hello.
Before I ask the doctor my particular question, I don't know if you talked to him anything about the Philadelphia experiment, Art.
Doctor, in Tom Clancy's, one of his recent books, Dead of Honor, he describes a weapon used by our boys as being a 3 million candlewatt searchlight that shines into the eyes of Japanese pilots and knocks them out straight through their optic nerve.
I was wondering if maybe it might really be something more like a pulsing light that does brainwave entrainment, sort of an artificial epileptic fit at a distance.
And as a matter of fact, the first raid in Debt of Honor is a total non-lethal weapons thing that we had decided.
I feed him stuff like that.
And what he actually, in using the light as he did there, that was at an airport in Japan, and it was showing the fallibility of non-lethal weapons because the plane crashes.
In other words, they blinded the pilot and he couldn't land.
As far as pulsing, the problem with that is that you can induce epileptic seizures, but predominantly in people who are predisposed.
It's one of the problems you've had in discos and whatnot where you have strobe lights.
If you find people who have had EEGs and you see delta waves that are embedded in there, you can trigger them, but it gets back to the problem of using any system against people.
They will work on one person and not on the next.
presumably if that was a weapon of choice you wouldn't have pilots subject epileptic seizure not you know what that You have later episodes.
I see.
I don't want to fight with a pilot that's epileptic.
Well, during your bathroom break, I mentioned that, and I think the doctor's answer was that that may well or may well not be, but nevertheless, they did explode something over there that short of a nuclear weapon was a gigantic bang.
unidentified
Yeah, my understanding was it releases a fuel spray, and then what happens is it's ignited and it actually creates a megaton explosion.
You can, you know, control the, it depends on the amount of fuel that's put in.
It's called fuel error because it's a double hit where you send in the fuel, have it disperse, and then ignite, and you get tremendous blast over pressure.
One of the areas that it was looked at initially was as a for clearing minefields because it would cause a uniform blast over pressure.
Yeah, I was wondering about the doctor think about the people, what is it, the Nazis basically disappearing over to Latin America right after World War II, as far as the Soviet Union shipping them over there for basically mind control experiments with drugs and the like they did with the Jews and the rest of that, the concentration camps.
And 1945 to 62, 300,000 people in Colombia were murdered at the rate of 48 people a day for 17 years and the like.
And the counterculture, anti-establishment, drug culture didn't start up during the Korean War with a beat nets and the hippies with harder drugs like LSD.
I just think that the experience that they had, well, I can tell you, for instance, that when MK Ultra went down, remember all of those experiments were terminated, it happened that it was not an easy blow.
And I know of people who actually lost projects totally unrelated to that one.
And the only sin they had was to be kept in the same safe drawer.
And as I mentioned earlier, I've talked to very senior people in the agency who just say, absolutely, under no way are they going to risk the wrath.
The problem is that I think if Congress ever caught you dabbling with those things without permission, they would hurt your budget.
I mean, that's why I say it's a golden rule issue.